Next stop: Hardware piracy

I last wrote about rapid prototyping five years ago. There've been
some changes.

Rapid prototyping is what it sounds
like - making things, faster than you could do it by hand. Usually to make prototypes of
something that you then intend to manufacture in a normal factory.

(Technically, it's only rapid prototyping if it's done by "additive"
sticking-together of some cohesive material, not by "subtractive" carving away of parts of a block,
which is what conventional machine tools do. Even an un-computerised
machine-shop can make certain kinds of prototype pretty darn quickly, but it probably won't be
advertised as a rapid-prototyping shop.)

There's a rapidly expanding rapid-prototyping enthusiast community, who often aren't actually
making prototypes. They're more interested in making small runs of final products, right there
on the desktop. People have started calling this "fabbing", and there are now several "digital
fabricator" - also known as "fabber" or just plain "fab" - projects that're suitable for hobbyists.
(The biggest names in relatively-cheap DIY fabs, so far, are "RepRap",
"Fab@Home" and "MakerBot",
but there are several others.)

Early efforts in small fabbers were largely focussed on making parts for
more
small fabbers, but now plenty of fabricators are making other things.

A "fabricator" always used to be a person who fabricated things, just as a "computer" always
used to be a person who computed. The meaning of "computer" slowly shifted as mechanical
addingmachines
developed into electronic computers, and now the meaning of "fabricator" is starting to blur,
too. Someone who hand-builds custom
exhaust manifolds is still a fabricator, but if you're reading
Hack a Day or the Make
blog or, of course, that one whole issue of the Make
magazine, and see a fabricator, it'll be a little machine. Which, usually, extrudes a thread
of hot plastic to build up an object, some or all of which is likely to have a distinctive
scribblylook.

Sintered-metal 3D prints are often rather fragile, but they can be dipped in another metal
with a lower melting point to fill the tiny voids, and that can leave you with a very sturdy object,
like several of Bathsheba Grossman's
sculptures.

(You could probably make a home laser sinterer that fuses zinc powder, then dip the resultant
zinc-sponge in molten tin for a moderately durable result. Since I have no intention whatsoever
of trying to do this, I'm quite confident that
it can't be very difficult.)

Commercial rapid fabricators already exist, some with capabilities approximately as amazing
as the computerised milling machines that can turn a blank slab of alloy
into an engine block. But professional
fabbers are extremely expensive to buy and run. The big news is small, cheap fabs.

And big news it really, really is, in certain circles at least. There's an absolute mania for
the things. I kept adding more and more and more examples to my source file for this article,
until I finally had to stop, to actually get this thing written. I swear that for a while there,
there were more 3D printing posts on maker blogs than
Minecraft posts on game blogs.

So a surprising amount of manufacturing capability may, soon, be sitting on ordinary consumers'
desks.

This sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but it wouldn't be the first time something this
peculiar has happened.

For a mundane example, look at desktop publishing. The very concept of designing and printing
your own professional-looking documents at home was ludicrous, until suddenly consumer-market
laser printers and graphical-interface home computers made it easy.

Home computers are actually a good example all by themselves. Old science-fiction is full of
ray-guns and sentient robots and faster-than-light drives, but
you won't find any
personal computers. Because, in 1955, the very notion of a "personal computer" was about as plausible
as a "personal ocean liner". It seemed pretty probable that people in 1985 would all have personal
helicopters, but personal computers? Pull the other one!

Thinking about it this way, there are plenty of situations in which comparing home 3D printing
with the old-fashioned alternatives would feel like comparing home document printing with putting
the image on paper with a pen.

Spare parts, for instance.

You know how you can go to an abandonware
site, or Good Old Games, and grab yourself a free or almost-free
copy of some excellent old game?

Well, how about doing the same thing for parts for your old car, or old dishwasher, or old
toys, or old pretty-much-anything-else?

You won't be able to make a new controller board for a modern computerised appliance, and things
with moving parts or specialised materials may also be a problem (like, for instance, a new fan
module for your fan-forced oven...). But home fabs can already make a variety of more prosaic
items.

In both of the above videos, and in most other fabber projects, a fabber is obviously not the
only possible way of solving the problem without buying a pre-made part. Even if you ignore non-optimal
solutions like replacing a releasable clip with glue or double-sided tape, you could still carve
a replacement out of wood by hand or with machines, or make something out of
polycaprolactone by hand instead of by extruding the same plastic from a low-temperature fabber
nozzle. And for applications not involving live wires, it's amazing what you can make with a bit
of thought, some coat-hangers and a
wire-bending jig.

But home fabs won't need to be much better than they are already for most plastic hardware-store
fixtures and fittings to become fabbable. Fabbing is still not a winner for bulk production, but
if you need a new plumbing fitting or shelf supports to fit a given spot perfectly, or some other
item that'd have you stalking the aisles at the local Hardware Blimp Hanger with notes and a tape
measure, then just whipping up the thing you want in some
SketchUp-like interface and then clicking
the "Fab!" button becomes immensely attractive.

There's also no law that says you have to fab every part of something. Future home fabs
may be able to construct certain circuit boards, probably some kinds of battery, perhaps even
transistors - but a lot of that stuff is going to have to be off-the-shelf components made in
a normal factory and then incorporated into a fabbed whole.

This is actually the way normal manufacturers work already. Only if a product has very specialised
requirements is it necessary for the manufacturer to create a whole new electric motor, bearing,
microcontroller or what-have you to put in it.

If you want any sort of home fabber for less than about $US3000 ("serious" commercial fabricators
cost a lot more), then you have to build your fabber at home. But we're getting past the
stage where every cheap rapid prototyper was, itself, a prototype and constant work-in-progress.
Now, we're starting to see off-the-shelf fabber kits like the MakerBot
Thing-O-Matic, which you can
pretty much just buy, build and use, like a loudspeaker or
R/C-toy kit.

(Oh, and there's currently some money waiting
for whoever manages to build a better RepRap.)

(Printer companies are also starting to show interest in making true pre-built off-the-shelf
fabbers affordable by home users. HP's commitment to the idea has thus been limited to
agreeing
to rebadge someone else's product - but still.)

The sci-fi-story dream fabber takes a blueprint for a mobile phone, crossbow, turbocharger
or original G1 Walther P-38 Megatron,
chugs away for a few hours, and then delivers the toasty-warm, just-like-a-bought-one item into
your hands.

Don't hold your breath for that to happen. You'd need cyberpunk nanotech to make it feasible,
plus either a ridiculous number of different feedstock materials, or a tame alchemist.

But compared with the rate of progress in most industries, fabbers are developing at a lightning
pace. If it looks slow, it's just because we're all spoiled by the outrageous rate of improvement
of computer hardware.

I wouldn't be surprised to see home fabbers printing arbitrary Lego components some time in
the next five years.

This would be more important than you might at first think. Current home fabbers can make things
that're just barelycompatible with Lego, but they
don't yet have the precision to do it properly. Once you can make commercial-quality Lego, though,
you can also make a long list of other quite serious engineering components. Home fabs are getting
there.

Prices for kit-built desktop fabbers are already dipping below $1000. The bulk plastic most
of them extrude isn't expensive, either. They're definitely more accessible to the home hacker
- or, at least, easier for the home hacker to lift - than many standard machine tools.

The specialised Web sites are showing up now, too. MakerBot Industries' "Thingiverse"
is your one-stop shop for free design swapping and collaboration, and "BatchPCB"
is essentially Zazzle for circuit boards. 3D
scanners are slowly getting better
and cheaper,
too. By the time it's unremarkable for hobbyists to have a 3D printer in the garage, they'll also
be able to easily scan that broken piece of plastic that's stopping a gadget from working, and
then fab an un-broken version, probably from a tougher polymer.

We may never actually end up with fabs as unremarkable household appliances. Look at printers
for a comparison: There've been true photo-quality inkjet printers for many years, now, but countless
users have given up on printers which, unless you use them frequently, need a ten-minute-and-twenty-five-dollar
cleaning ritual whenever you want to print one darn photo.

The alternative to a-fabber-in-every-garage is the "output bureau" model. There are already
services that'll take a 3D model and rapid-fabricate it in a variety of materials, just as you
can get your digital photos printed at a kiosk or via an online service.
I.materialise and
Shapeways, for instance, both offer far better precision and far more materials than you can
get out of a hobby fab.

(I also like the idea of a
travelling
factory, like a cross between nomadic tinkers and the circus.)

I think you're going to have to use a service like that if you want to print something in metal.
If you want a metal object, you could print it in plastic and then use the plastic as a
castingpattern, but casting is a whole
separate field of endeavour.

ABS - the stuff
Lego's made from - is probably the most popular plastic for extruder-type fabs, and it melts only
slightly above the boiling point of water. There are
low-melting-point alloys
that a cheap desktop fabber could probably cope with, but those alloys all have such unexciting
physical properties - poor strength, toxic constituent metals - that you'd almost always be better
off with plastic. To extrude lead-free pewter,
you'd probably need a 300°C nozzle.

It's not, however, out of the question that hobbyists will soon be producing even quite complex
items, like circuit boards, in a pretty automated way. People are already, for instance, working
on hobby-scale pick-and-place
systems, like this one.

(A lot of kit-fabs are actually already made from laser-cut materials. The black edges and
plain faces of laser-cut MDF
are as distinctive, and as common, as the scribbles of extruded-plastic fabber output.)

If small-scale manufacturing becomes really widespread, the effect could be very dramatic indeed.
It could be one of those great reducers of technical friction, like the development of
standardised fasteners.

It probably won't be long before home fabs are able to make most of the parts for a gun.
Blokes in Afghanistan have
for many years been making arbitrary
firearms from scratch with little more than hand tools. So fabbed
zip guns can't be very far away,
and StoriesNoParent Should
Miss on the subject
may be rather closer.

(For this reason, it's possible that capable fabs and/or their feedstock materials will be
legally restricted in some countries. John
Scalzi's "The Android's
Dream" was somewhat ahead of the curve on this subject.)

I don't really know where home fabbing's going, though. I suspect that while we're all distracted
by people making Nerf guns and Stormtrooper armour, someone's going to startle us all with something
like a $20 home-built DNA computer.

Or maybe someone'll come up with a price breakthrough in 3D microfabrication. Commercial
focused-lasermicrofabs can make mechanical parts
below micron scale (for comparison, the micromirrors in a
DLP projector are more than
ten microns across). Soon, hobbyists could be making autonomous robots the size of sugar cubes.

One of the big reasons why it's hard to invent new things is that the inventor often finds
themselves having to make new tools to make the device, or even having to make tools to make the
tools, et cetera. And once an inventor finally gets past these hurdles, they're usually not particularly
inclined to now go into the tool-making business to help other people over these hurdles.

Today, the Web lets people share how-to information with the world. In the future, widespread
access to fabbers will extend this collaborative data-sharing into collaborative object-sharing,
which should massively streamline the production of many kinds of esoteric equipment. The production
and operation of fabbers themselves is, of course, a tools-to-make-the-tools situation, but every
day more
tips
and
tricks
circulate in the fabbing community.

Whatever happens, one thing's for sure:

If you sell collectible action figures for a living, you should be nervous.